Freeze - A short story
Our civilization would someday end. We’ve known this for a long time, just that we didn’t know how or when. Ironically, civilization is dying because of something designed to save it.
I’m making this recording so that if we fail, someone else can continue our work with what we already know rather than starting from scratch.
To counter climate change, project Winter was founded. I don’t know much about what the eggheads who started this whole thing were trying to do or how it worked, I’m an engineer, not a chemist but what I do know is this - it was a plan was to release massive amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere, effectively creating a huge number of clouds. Over time this would bring down the temperature of the Earth until the effects of runaway climate change stopped altogether. The process began in 2027. Within a year, the average temperature.of the Earth came down from 34° Celsius to 28° Celsius. Everyone was optimistic and couldn’t wait to see what a brighter future held.
But then the whole situation went sideways when people noticed that the temperature did not stop dropping. By 2067, the hottest place in the world had a temperature of 2° Celcius. Storms raged across continents devastating everything in their path. Riots broke out all over the planet outside government offices and project Winter’_s headquarters. People were killed in the thousands either by someone’s hand or by the extreme cold. Out of the blue, something bizarre happened. A year ago in 2110, ten people died due to high exposure to solar radiation though the sky is covered in an endless sheet of grey and the ozone layer was mostly still intact. So my research team at _Winter headquarters were tasked with finding out what was happening.
The temperature outside is -100° Celsius. So we have to wear massive suits just to conduct basic experiments. Our upper atmosphere probe gave us something interesting - The CO2 percentage is constantly decreasing in the air. However it was noticed that the disappearing CO2 had not gone off into space. Since matter cannot just disappear, something else was happening. Something that we aren’t seeing but is happening regardless. Like a snake in the grass, we won’t see it till it strikes.
The surface is a frozen wasteland. Nothing grows there anymore. A normal human being wouldn’t survive for twenty minutes.
Today my work just begins. It’s part of my five year mission to investigate as to where the CO2 is going and what it even means.
I am often reminded of a story I heard during my childhood - the story of a young bird who thought the sky was falling. While I do take away those lessons from the story, I also believe that it teaches people to look at situations from a different angle. The bird thought that an apple falling on his head meant that the sky was falling simply because he didn’t have a perspective that allowed him to see the truth. In real life, we are nothing but the bird and our situation in my view is nothing more than an apple.
As I thought about this, I suddenly had newer and better ideas for my investigation. Thus began my five years of continuous toiling, a trial I must take on in order to right the wrongs that the organisation I work for has done to the planet.
Five Years Later
On that day I shakily stood near my desk. I had my thermal suit on as I was just preparing to go outside the lab. The pressure outside had decreased so much that a loose screw from near the outer structure of the lab had come off and went flying right through the glass window. Everything in the lab flew at once towards the hole. I myself was pulled towards the hole by a few feet until the pressure equalised. The sky outside was as gray as the moon. After a few seconds I ran out of breath and collapsed on the ground. Over the past five years, the Carbon Dioxide gas had completely disappeared followed by the depletion of Oxygen, rendering the air unbreathable. In the last few days, even nitrogen had vanished. I inched to the spare oxygen tank. I grabbed the mask and ripped it away from the wall and wrapped it around my face. I turned the valve on the cylinder a few times but it broke off leaving behind a metal stud which was welded onto the tank. I barely had time to think, my vision was getting blurrier and my breaths were becoming shorter and shallower. I ripped off the mask I had on my face and crawled over to the tank right next to it, grabbed the mask attached to it and turned the valve. The tank hissed as oxygen poured out of it through the holes in the mask. I strapped it on and breathed a sigh of relief.
I got onto my feet and prepared to seal the bullet sized hole that caused this dilemma when suddenly I heard the sound of something getting crushed under my feet. I moved my foot to find a chalk like substance. I picked up a few grams of it and put it on my smart-desk.The desk lit up with three green dots and the word “Analysing”. It then displayed the word “Oxygen”.
The substance which I picked up was solid Oxygen, a few grams of it must have leaked out from my mask. This could only mean two things - one, the temperature was around -200 degrees Celcius and without the suit I was wearing beforehand, I would have died and two, the weather was cold enough to freeze the major and minor gases present in the air. All of a sudden, my eyes widened in realisation. The probes only picked up the gases in the atmosphere, not liquids or solids. This meant that as the Carbon Dioxide froze into a solid, the probe would tell me that the Carbon Dioxide was disappearing. Similarly with the other gases, each froze into a solid and as that happened allowed more heat to escape the Earth, accelerating the cool down. At some point, it would be cold enough to flash freeze the entire atmosphere. A disturbing thought found its way into my mind - I hadn’t been outside for a few days and the clouds hadn’t moved even a little. I panicked and looked at the images I took about a week earlier and the sky I could see now - the exact same sheet of gray with a few spots of purple where the clouds weren’t present. One thought led to another. What if the entire atmosphere was now a giant hollow-sphere covering the Earth? Under the force of gravity, this solid sky would crack, allowing pieces of it to plummet to the surface which would result in the collapse of the entire structure… Now I had to know if this were true.
I quickly sealed up the hole using some spare materials and opened my laptop. I scanned for orbiting satellites that still had a live connection with the Earth. A single green spot showed up on my monitor. I clicked on it and a large white circle appeared - the loading screen. I turned around for a moment and thought - That had to be a wild conclusion. Just like the young bird, I thought that the sky was literally falling because of a lack of perspective! That’s it! Just a misunderstanding of data. The sky falling - what a joke! I turned around to the laptop only to find that the screen remained the same with the same white circle in the middle of it. Then I noticed the words “live feed” on the right hand corner of the monitor. That can’t be right. I refreshed my connection to the satellite only to see the exact same image. It took me a minute to see the slight shadow on one edge of the circle, which made me realise that I was looking at a sphere - a planet! But the satellite was in Earth orbit and what I saw looked nothing like Earth or the Moon. It was a milky white sphere against the pitch black background of the universe.
Suddenly I realised what I was looking at. The image was a hundred percent accurate and my suspicions were confirmed by what followed in the next few minutes. A deafening sound of something cracking resonated through the planet and a large black line appeared in the grey sky like a fork of lightning. Smaller cracks came into view simultaneously. When the noise stopped, I gazed out of my window at the last moments of human civilisation. The reckoning began as a single chunk of frozen air fell to the ground leaving a hole the size of a basketball in the now frozen sky. The hole was almost directly above where my lab was. The chunk hit the top of the building I was in then bounced off the side and landed a few meters away. It was followed by larger pieces of the sky tumbling towards the ground. I remembered the story I was told during my childhood - the little bird who thought the sky was falling. All he needed was a better perspective. My situation was the reverse- the sky was actually falling.